TY  - BOOK
AU  - Lewis-Faupel,Sean
AU  - Neggers,Yusuf
AU  - Olken,Benjamin A.
AU  - Pande,Rohini
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Can Electronic Procurement Improve Infrastructure Provision? Evidence From Public Works in India and Indonesia
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2014///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - July 2014; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Poorly functioning, and often corrupt, public procurement procedures are widely faulted for the low quality of infrastructure provision in developing countries. Can electronic procurement (e-procurement), which reduces both the cost of acquiring tender information and personal interaction between bidders and procurement officials, ameliorate these problems? In this paper we develop a unique micro-dataset on public works procurement from two fast-growing economies, India and Indonesia, and use regional and time variation in the adoption of e-procurement across both countries to examine its impact. We find no evidence that e-procurement reduces prices paid by the government, but do find that it is associated with quality improvements. In India, where we observe an independent measure of construction quality, e-procurement improves the average road quality, and in Indonesia, e-procurement reduces delays in completion of public works projects. Bidding data suggests that an important channel of influence is selection -- regions with e-procurement have a broader distribution of winners, with (better) winning bidders more likely to come from outside the region where the work takes place. On net, the results suggest that e-procurement facilitates entry from higher quality contractors
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w20344
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w20344
ER  -